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Very little in my adult life has made me feel my feminism so strongly as the 2016 defeat of Hillary Rodham Clinton. And by “defeat,” I mean her utter evisceration by the press, many Bernie Sanders supporters, the Donald Trump campaign, and a shocking number of regular Americans. The disgusting patriarchal bacchanalia that occurred during the campaign has nearly been matched by the attacks on Clinton that have continued since the election. She has been criticized even for writing a memoir of the election, What Happened, a book that has been variously called too long to read (Frank 2017) and an exercise in shifting responsibility (Zurcher 2017).

After the publication of What Happened, much attention was directed toward analyzing and commenting on a section of Hillary Rodham Clinton's book that detailed her thinking in a split-second situation during one of the presidential debates with Donald Trump. Clinton explains that during the second debate, which occurred just days after the release of the famous Access Hollywood tape in which Trump “bragged about groping women” (Clinton 2017, 136), Trump was more or less following her around the small stage, “staring at [her], making faces” (136). She notes that it was “incredibly uncomfortable. He was literally breathing down my neck” (136). But she also considers her response to Trump's physically threatening demeanor during the debate and whether she responded appropriately or “correctly.” Clinton kept her cool—she kept going in the face of what she describes as a physically menacing situation. She refused to be “rattled” by Trump's proximate presence or by the individuals he invited to sit in the audience to intimidate her.

On September 11, 2016, less than two months before Election Day, Hillary Clinton attended the 9/11 memorial service in New York City. Reportedly, Clinton left the event early, and as she was getting into her SUV, she fainted. A bystander caught on camera a wobbly Clinton needing assistance getting into her vehicle, which he posted to Twitter, where it immediately circulated (Kafka 2016). News media outlets soon picked it up and were quick to air the footage. Initially, the Clinton campaign explained that Clinton had been “overheated.” Later that afternoon, however, the campaign announced that two days prior, Clinton had been diagnosed with walking pneumonia, and despite being advised to rest, she had attended the memorial event.

“Lock her up! Lock her up! Lock her up!” This battle cry erupted at one Donald Trump rally after another throughout the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump even threatened to jail Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC) if he won the election. “Crooked Hillary” emerged as Trump's disparaging nickname for his Democratic opponent. Taking a further moralistic step, Trump equated HRC with pure evil, calling her the “devil” at an August 2016 campaign rally in Pennsylvania.

Hillary Clinton's memoir of the 2016 election and her life in politics, What Happened, is an affective rollercoaster. Wrath, frustration, regret, and sorrow, among other intensified emotions, saturate the book's pages. This range of affect is surprising for a political autobiography. Books in this genre typically present their subject-selves as stalwart and emotionally controlled actors whose range of feeling is limited to the proper amount of righteous irritation or vague empathy necessary to justify a policy proposal. None has the rawness of Clinton's book, a rawness that is, I would argue, made possible by her gender. This is one of the few vectors of political expression that is expanded, not contracted, for Clinton in her role as the first woman to become a major-party presidential candidate.

As noted in the introduction to this issue of Politics & Gender, for this Special Issue on Gender and Conservatism, we have coordinated the book review section with the thematics of the volume's four research articles. This lends the volume an intellectual cohesion that we hope will prove engaging, as it also expands the purview of topics that come into play where the intersections of conservatism and feminism are concerned. The books reviewed here suggest the rich diversity of the scholarly work that is now being generated on this question.